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Should candidates be paid for time spent interviewing?

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Everyone seems to agree that the way we interview people is broken.  I’ve heard the analogy that an interview is like asking someone to marry you after you’ve dated them for an hour.  I agree with this.  It’s a big commitment for both sides and there isn’t much time to figure out if you’re a good fit.  In an effort to avoid bad hires, a lot of companies are using longer interview processes:

  1. Some companies will give candidates an at home test to work on in their free time.  I’ve heard stories of these being side projects that take up to 2 weeks.
  2. Some companies want you to take a day off for a full day interview.
  3. Some companies want you to take a day off to actually work at the company for a day as a trail run.

Should a company pay for the time that a candidate spends interviewing?

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To those that advocate manual tests instead of automated tests

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There are people out there who are not the biggest fans of automated tests.  They think they cause more trouble than they are worth.  I can definitely sympathize with that perspective. In fact, I will readily admit it can be completely true.  A bad automated test can be worse than no test.  But, I’ve worked on projects that had a lot of good automated tests and I think they were better off for them.

There are people out there who think writing all these automated tests is usually more trouble than it’s worth.  The alternative to automated tests is to “run your software frequently in a live scenario to test the features as they’re being deployed“.  But, I have some questions for the people that feel this way:

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